Reports of abuse of Filipinos fabricated

SOCIAL DISORDER:A journalist and a Facebook user face charges of disturbing public order by spreading rumors after two stories they posted online proved to have been falsified

By Loa Iok-sin / Staff reporter

Shih Hsin University Chinese-language newspaper Lih Pao is pictured.

Photo: Chen Yi-ching, Taipei Times

A woman surnamed Tung (董) and a journalist surnamed Cheng (鄭) who had reported that they had personally witnessed incidents in which restaurant owners had refused to sell food to Philippine nationals amid the recent tensions between Manila and Taipei have admitted they had only “heard” about the incidents.

Amid the row between Taiwan and the Philippines over the fatal shooting of Taiwanese fisherman Hung Shih-cheng (洪石成) by Philippine Coast Guard personnel on May 9, two stories were circulated among netizens detailing incidents in which restaurant owners were said to have refused to sell food to Philippine nationals.

In a post on her Facebook page last week, Tung said that a Philippine worker had asked her to buy lunch for him because a restaurant owner had refused to sell food to Filipinos, adding that he had been trying to get food for more than an hour, but no one had been willing to help him.

Tung wrote that she had immediately bought food for the man and told the owner that it was wrong to vent his anger about the shooting on a Filipino worker in Taiwan.

Separately, Cheng, a journalist at the Chinese-language daily Lih Pao, posted a similar story on his Facebook page last week, saying that he saw a restaurant owner call two Filipinos “dogs” and saying he refused to sell food to “dogs.”

Cheng wrote that as the two Filipinos protested, the owner had thrown food on the ground and told them to eat it like the dogs they were.

Cheng also claimed that he had told the owner his behavior was inappropriate and had bought lunch for the Filipinos.

The two posts quickly went viral and were shared by tens of thousands of Facebook users, many of whom condemned the restaurant owners, though others questioned if the stories were true.

To show that he supported and trusted his colleague, Chang Cheng (張正), editor-in-chief of Four Way Voice (四方報), Lih Pao’s sister newspaper, asked Cheng to arrange an unofficial interview with the restaurant owner.

Chang posted the interview on his Facebook page, which seemed to validate Cheng’s original post and confirm that the story was true.

However, doubts continued to grow and Minister of the Interior Lee Hong-yuan (李鴻源) ordered a probe into the stories.

“I was deceived, it was my fault, I apologize,” Chang told a news conference at Lih Pao’s head office in New Taipei City (新北市) yesterday afternoon. “After Cheng posted the story on his Facebook page, Lih Pao’s deputy executive editor-in-chief Liao Yun-chang (廖雲章) and I confirmed with Cheng several times that the story was true. To further verify it, we also asked Cheng to arrange the interview with the restaurant owner.”

However, to his horror, both the story and the interview turned out to be false, Chang said.

After being questioned by the police on Tuesday night, “Cheng admitted that he had merely ‘heard’ about the story instead of having ‘witnessed’ it personally, and that the restaurant owner [that I met] was not actually a restaurant owner, but a friend of his who agreed to act as the owner mentioned in his story,” Chang said.

“I deeply regret Cheng’s dishonesty and I apologize for my failure to recognize that the story was false,” he added. “Cheng will be dismissed from his post immediately and I will also tender my resignation as editor-in-chief of Four Way Voice.”

Tung also apologized to the public and journalists at a press confernce, once on Tuesday evening and again yesterday morning.